All posts tagged: UNO

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening : 1. 2020 RPM / UNO

BSA Special Feature: 2020 RPM / UNO

An expert interconnector of textures and patterns of urban living and pop art sensibilities, the Italian Street Artist UNO captures the essence of his inside life during quarantine in a new brief video today.

A clicking time meter of life passing and the daily
benchmarks that give shape to one continuous life in captivity, it’s the
repetition that reveals the patterns, the subtle variations encoded in the DNA
of living.

We have a lot to show you this week of art from the street, museum, and studio. This horrid and chaotic political environment is proving to be fertile soil for the growth of politically themed works by artists everywhere.

We start todays’ posting with the image above created with the simplicity of a mirror held up during a recent demonstration as if to say, “this is what America looks like”, by the artists “Icy & Sot”. The people who is reflected back to the camera appear in stark contrast to the nearly exclusively white, male, ultra-rich cabinet he has selected as his advisors.

First thing to know about the new piece in Lisbon above is that the Street Artist who made it, UNO, has a phobia with birds. The second thing is to know that if you see a crow flying overhead in Lisbon, some people will tell you that it is protecting the city. The belief is a remnant from a 12th century story that says the beloved Saint Vincent was buried in Sagres, where his body was protected by crows. When his body was moved to Lisbon by the first King of Portugal, D. Afonso Henrique, it is said that two crows accompanied the body. This is why the flag of Lisbon has a ship and two ravens on either side with the motto “MUI NOBRE E SEMPRE LEAL CIDADE DE LISBOA” (the most noble and always loyal to the city of Lisbon) .

It’s Bushwick Collective Weekend Yo! The assembled faces and artists is local, national, international – a melange of what Brooklyn has become in recent years and the streets are alive with involved citizenry in search of entertainment, art and community. The Street Art scene is alive and well, just mutating weirdly as it always does; charges of commercialism and the whitening power of gentrification notwithstanding. A little further out in BedStuy was the #PrincePartyBK yesterday with Spike Lee celebrating the Purple One’s birthday, along with a lot of Biggie love, and Muhammad Ali love, and you, Love.

It has been two days since the Sun was directly over the Equator and she is heading north to bring the Global North a lot of flowers and blossoms in the earliest spring since 1896. Today we have newly budded interventions from three cities in this warming hemisphere that may make you think of Spring 2016. See here new pieces from Amsterdam, Rome and Paris by sticker artist BonBon, wheat paster UNO and site-specific billboard jacker OX respectively.

Rome-based Street Artist UNO has on his mind the Surpreme Leader of North Korea, who Vanity Fair recently contrasted with a potential US President Trump. These don’t really look like Kim Jong-un’s features nor pallor but that fabulous hair is hitting the heights like a nuclear explosion! BTW Uno puts his own two-eye logo in the wallpaper pattern in the background. And no, we do not understand any of this at all.

And finally, new billboard takeovers by the minimalist conceptualist OX in Paris, whose installations are deeply sympathetic with their environment, often mimicking the colors/shapes/textures that are nearby. OX tells us, “I found these very “French!” Certainly the first one is.

Published last month this towering book with the page edges sprayed neon orange was released by Mehdi Ben Cheikh in French and English to commemorate the event, and seeing the installations this way is going to make you wish the place wasn’t destroyed. 500 new photos previously unpublished allows you to see the show as you travel from the cellar to the top floors.

You may wish you had more background on the artists and the context and clearly not all of the artistry is of similar quality but you will be satiated by the images and thankful that they were recorded during their brief duration. Published by Editions Albin Michel, in partnership with the Itinerrance Gallery, this show will continue to soar long after the dust has settled.

Scroll to the end to see the brand new video of M-City stencilling atop a sea vessel during his Nordic oceanic installation off the coast of Stavanger. Also, check out the blowing winds on the mic at the beginning.

BSA Special Feature: TOOFLY in Miami

“There is a different dynamic that takes place when women get together and paint or build or create something,” explains Queens born Toofly as she scales the ladder in Miami during Art Basel this year. The short by Alexandra Henry gives voice to the artist, designer and organizer as she describes coming up in the 1990s wall painting surrounded primarily by dudes. Now as she moves to a different stage and embraces her Ecuadorean roots, Toofly is joined by a new generation of women who are laying claim to the street and adding their voices to the conversation.

8 Artists, One Day in La Perla

An overcast day in Old San Juan is still better than a sunny one inside an office cubicle, ya herd? Here’s a gently rolling survey of a community called La Perla, who in one day received new gifts bestowed from Alexis Diaz, Faith47, Axel Void, Filio, Inti, Conor Harrington, Poteleche, and Franco Jaz. Captured by Tost Fims, it is free of so many of the video making conventions of Street Art film-making that it may be pulling the genre in a new direction.

UNO in Bolonga, Italy

UNO and Matteo Talone take wheatpasting to a new very long expanse in Bologna, hand coloring meters and meters of pop inspired black and white image/text patterning for the Cheap Festival.

Phlegm / Run / Christiaan Nagel in London

A teaser for a series of films (Last Breath) that will be made documenting the beautification of soon-to-be demolished buildings in London. Touring the remains of structural decrepitude is not new, but doing so artfully like this is.

Surplus Candy

A new video from Nick Heller features a tour from the recent abandoned house takeover on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

“When I received the invitation to take part in a street art festival in Athens I thought I would try to paint a wall speaking about the problems of Greece and in particular to speak about the consequences of the crisis they are experiencing,” says UNO of his invitation to participate in the first Athens Street Art Festival. Ironically, he says, the piece he had in mind never made it onto the actual street, but we’re bringing it to you here since he made the effort.

“A few weeks before my departure I heard the news about the closing (obscuring) of Greek public TV, so I decided to paint a wall with the words ‘obscure this’ as a provocation,” says UNO of his original plan to paint a large scale wall addressing the sudden shutdown in June that many journalists in Europe have charged is a form of censorship. Unfortunately when he arrived he learned that the wall he had planned could not happen because of logistic problems, he says, so he did this version inside the School of Fine Arts before heading back to Italy.

Big week for street festivals on BSA where we blew up our server on the LODZ murals in Poland, the MURAL Festival in Montreal, and now the most community based of them all – the Ad Hoc Wellington Court block party Street Art jamboree thing in Queens, which we have some new images of today. Not to mention we got up on some roofs and Klub7 got down on the ground. So much fun, sun, and good times to be had with art and the creative spirit cut loose in the streets.